4



D i v i n e Grace Lost

*

Prostitute of the Mind



At home, I found a thick letter in the mailbox. It was from Lieutenant Mamiya. My name
and address had been written on the envelope in the same bold, handsome characters as
before. I changed clothes, washed my face, and went to the kitchen, where I drank two glasses
of cold water. Once I had had a moment to catch my breath, I cut the letter open.
Lieutenant Mamiya had used a fountain pen to fill some ten thin sheets of letter paper with
tiny characters. I flipped through the pages and put them back into the envelope. I was too
tired to read such a long letter; I didn't have the powers of concentration just then. When my
eyes scanned the rows of handwritten characters, they looked like a swarm of strange blue
bugs. And besides, the voice of Noboru Wataya was still echoing faintly in my mind.
I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes for a long time, thinking of nothing. It was
not hard for me to think of nothing, the way I felt at the moment. In order not to think of any
one thing, all I had to do was think of many things, a little at a time: just think about
something for a moment and fling it into space.
It was nearly five o'clock in the evening when I finally decided to read Lieutenant
Mamiya's letter. I went out to the veranda, sat leaning against a pillar, and took the pages
from the envelope.
The whole first page was filled with conventional phrases: extended seasonal greetings,
thanks for my having invited him to my home the other day, and profound apologies for
having bored me with his endless stories. Lieutenant Mamiya was certainly a man who knew


the civilities. He had survived from an age when such civilities occupied a major portion of
daily life. I skimmed through those and turned to the second page.
Please forgive me for having gone on at such length with these preliminary matters [it
began]. My sole purpose in writing this letter today, knowing full well that my
presumptuousness in doing so can only burden you with an unwanted task, is to inform you
that the events I recently told you about were neither a fabrication of mine nor the dubious
reminiscences of an old man, but are the complete and solemn truth in every particular. As
you know, the war ended a very long time ago, and memory naturally degenerates as the
years go by. Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never
age, and certain memories can never fade.
Up to and including this very day, I have never told any of these things to anyone but you,
Mr. Okada. To most people, these stories of mine would sound like the most incredible
fabrications. The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their
own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my
stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years
clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion.
I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push
them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these
memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh.
Even now I can recall each tiny detail with such terrible clarity, I feel I am remembering
events that happened yesterday. I can hold the sand and the grass in my hands; I can even
smell them. I can see the shapes of the clouds in the sky. I can feel the dry, sandy wind against
my cheeks. By comparison, it is the subsequent events of my life that seem like delusions on
the borderline of dream and reality.
The very roots of my life-those things that I can say once truly belonged to me alone-were
frozen stiff or burned away out there, on the steppes of Outer Mongolia, where there was
nothing to obstruct one's vision as far as the eye could see. Afterward, I lost my hand in that
fierce battle with the Soviet tank unit that attacked across the border; I tasted unimaginable
hardships in a Siberian labor camp in the dead of winter; I was repatriated and served for
thirty uneventful years as a social studies teacher in a rural high school; and I have since
lived alone, tilling the land. But all those subsequent months and years to me feel like nothing
but an illusion. It is as if they never happened. In an instant, my memory leaps across that
empty shell of time and takes me back to the wilds ofHulunbuir.
What cost me my life, what turned it into that empty shell, I believe, was something in the
light I saw at the bottom of the well-that intense light of the sun that penetrated straight down
to the very bottom of the well for ten or twenty seconds. It would come without warning, and
disappear just as suddenly. But in that momentary flood of light I saw something-saw
something once and for all-that I could never see again as long as I lived. And having seen it,
I was no longer the same person I had been.
What happened down there? What did it mean? Even now, more than forty years later, I
cannot answer those questions with any certainty. Which is why what I am about to say is
strictly a hypothesis, a tentative explanation that I have fashioned for myself without the
benefit of any logical basis. I do believe, however, that this hypothesis of mine is, for now, the
closest that anyone can come to the truth of what it was that I experienced.
Outer Mongolian troops had thrown me into a deep, dark well in the middle of the steppe,
my leg and shoulder were broken, I had neither food nor water: I was simply waiting to die.
Before that, I had seen a man skinned alive. Under these special circumstances, I believe, my
consciousness had attained such a viscid state of concentration that when the intense beam of
light shone down for those few seconds, I was able to descend directly into a place that might
be called the very core of my own consciousness. In any case, I saw the shape of something
there. Just imagine: Everything around me is bathed in light. I am in the very center of a flood


of light. My eyes can see nothing. I am simply enveloped in light. But something begins to
appear there. In the midst of my momentary blindness, something is trying to take shape.
Some thing. Some thing that possesses life. Like the shadow in a solar eclipse, it begins to
emerge, black, in the light. But I can never quite make out its form. It is trying to come to me,
trying to confer upon me something very much like heavenly grace. I wait for it, trembling.
But then, either because it has changed its mind or because there is not enough time, it never
comes to me. The moment before it takes full shape, it dissolves and melts once again into the
light. Then the light itself fades. The time for the light to shine down into the well has ended.
This happened two days in a row. Exactly the same thing. Something began to take shape
in the overflowing light, then faded before it could reach a state of fullness. Down in the well,
I was suffering with hunger and thirst-suffering terribly. But finally, this was not of major
importance. What I suffered with most down there in the well was the torture of being unable
to attain a clear view of that something in the light: the hunger of being unable to see what I
needed to see, the thirst of being unable to know what I needed to know. Had I been able to
see it clearly, I would not have minded dying right then and there. I truly felt that way. I
would have sacrificed anything for a full view of its form.
Finally, though, the form was snatched away from me forever. The grace came to an end
before it could be given to me. And as I said earlier, the life I led after emerging from that
hole in the ground was nothing but a hollow, empty shell. Which is why, when the Soviet Army
invaded Manchuria just before the end of the war, I volunteered to be sent to the front. In the
Siberian labor camp, too, I purposely strove to have myself placed in the most difficult
circumstances. No matter what I did, however, I could not die. Just as Corporal Honda had
predicted that night, I was fated to return to Japan and live an amazingly long life. I
remember how happy that news made me when I first heard it. But it turned out to be, if any-
thing, a curse. It was not that I would not die: I could not die. Corporal Honda had been right
about that too: I would have been better off not knowing.
When the revelation and the grace were lost, my life was lost. Those living things that had
once been there inside me, that had been for that reason of some value, were dead now. Not
one thing was left. They had all been burned to ashes in that fierce light. The heat emitted by
that revelation or grace had seared away the very core of the life that made me the person I
was. Surely I had lacked the strength to resist that heat. And so I feel no fear of death. If
anything, my physical death would be, for me, a form of salvation. It would liberate me
forever from this hopeless prison, this pain of being me.
Again I have burdened you with an overlong tale. I beg your forgiveness. But what I want
to convey to you, Mr. Okada, is this: I happened to lose my life at one particular moment in
time, and I have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost. As a person who
finds himself in such a position, I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than
those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the
briefest moment-perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp
its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in
hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look
forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what
should have been.
In any case, I am grateful for the chance to have met you, Mr. Okada, and to have told
you my story. Whether it will ever be of any use to you, I cannot be certain. But by telling it to
you, I feel that I have attained a kind of salvation. Frail and tenuous though it may be, to me
any kind of salvation is a treasure. Nor can I but sense the presence of the subtle threads of
fate to think that Mr. Honda was the one who guided me to it. Please remember, Mr. Okada,
that there is someone here sending his best wishes to you for a happy life in the years to come.
I read through the letter one more time, with care, and returned it to its envelope.
Lieutenant Mamiya's letter moved my heart in strange ways, but to my mind it brought


only vague and distant images. Lieutenant Mamiya was a man I could trust and accept, and I
could also accept as fact those things that he declared to be facts. But the very concept of fact
or truth had little power to persuade me just then. What most moved me in his letter was the
sense of frustration that permeated the lieutenant's words: the frustration of never quite being
able to depict or explain anything to his full satisfaction.
I went to the kitchen for a drink of water. Then I wandered around the house. In the
bedroom, I sat on the bed and looked at Kumiko's dresses lined up in the closet. And I
thought, What has been the point of my life until now? I saw what Noboru Wataya had been
talking about. My first reaction to his words had been anger, but I had to admit that he was
right. "You have been married to my sister for six years," he had said, "and what have you
done in all that time? Nothing, right? All you've accomplished in six long years is to quit your
job and ruin Kumiko's life. Now you're out of work and you have no plans for the future.
There's nothing inside that head of yours but garbage and rocks." I had no choice but to admit
the accuracy of his remarks. Objectively speaking, I had done nothing meaningful in these six
years, and what I had in my head was indeed something very like garbage and rocks. I was a
zero. Just as he had said.
But was it true that I had ruined Kumiko's life?
For a long time, I looked at her dresses and blouses and skirts in the closet. They were the
shadows Kumiko had left behind. Bereft of their owner, these shadows could only hang where
they were, limp. I went to the bathroom and took out the bottle of Christian Dior cologne that
someone had given to Kumiko. I opened it and smelled it. It was the fragrance I had smelled
behind Kumiko's ears the morning she had left the house. I slowly poured the entire contents
into the sink. As the liquid flowed down the drain, a strong smell of flowers (the exact name
of which I tried but failed to recall) hung over the sink, stirring up memories with brutal
intensity. In the midst of this intense aroma, I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Then I
decided to go to May Kasahara's.



As always, I stood in the alley at the back of the Miyawaki house, waiting for May
Kasahara to appear, but this time it didn't work. I leaned against the fence, sucked on a lemon
drop, looked at the bird sculpture, and thought about Lieutenant Mamiya's letter. Soon,
however, it began to grow dark. After waiting close to half an hour, I gave up. May Kasahara
was probably out somewhere.
I made my way back down the alley to the rear of my house and scaled the wall. Inside, I
found the place filled with the hushed, pale darkness of a summer evening. And Creta Kano
was there. For one hallucinatory moment, I felt I was dreaming. But no, this was the
continuation of reality. A subtle trace of the cologne I had spilled still floated in the air. Creta
Kano was sitting on the sofa, her hands on her knees. I drew closer to her, but as if time itself
had stopped inside her, she made not the slightest movement. I turned on the light and sat in
the chair facing her. "The door was unlocked," she said at last. "I let myself in."
"That's all right," I said. "I usually leave the door unlocked when I go out."
She wore a lacy white blouse, flouncy mauve skirt, and large earrings. On her left wrist
she wore a large pair of matching bracelets. The sight of them sent a shock through me. They
were virtually identical to the bracelets I had seen her wearing in my dream. Her hair and
makeup were both done in the style she always used. Hair spray held the hair perfectly in
place as usual, as if she had just arrived from the beauty parlor.
"There is not much time," she said. "I have to return home right away. But I wanted to be
sure I had a chance to talk with you, Mr. Okada. You saw my sister and Mr. Wataya today, I
believe."
"Sure did. Not that it was the most fun little gathering."


"Isn't there something you would like to ask me in connection with that?" she asked.
All kinds of people were coming to me with all kinds of questions.
"I'd like to know more about Noboru -Wataya," I said. "I can't help thinking that I have to
know more about him."
She nodded. "I would like to know more about Mr. Wataya myself. I believe that my
sister has already told you that he defiled me once, a very long time ago. I don't have time to
go into that today, but I will, on some future occasion. In any case, it was something done to
me against my will. It had originally been arranged for me to have relations with him. Which
is why it was not rape in the ordinary sense of the word. But he did defile me, and that
changed me as a person in many important ways. In the end, I was able to recover from the
experience. Indeed, it enabled me (with the help of Malta Kano, of course) to bring myself to
a whole new, higher level. Whatever the end results may have been, the fact remains that
Noboru Wataya violated and defiled me at that time against my will. What he did to me was
wrong-and dangerous. The potential was there for me to have been lost forever. Do you see
what I mean?" I did not see what she meant.
"Of course, I had relations with you too, Mr. Okada, but it was something done in the
correct way, with a correct purpose. I was in no way defiled by that."
I looked directly at her for several seconds, as if staring at a wall with colored blotches.
"You had relations with me?"
"Yes," she said. "The first time I only used my mouth, but the second time we had
relations. In the same room both times. You remember, of course? We had so little time on
the first occasion, we had to hurry. There was more time to spare on the second occasion." It
was impossible for me to reply to her.
"I was wearing your wife's dress the second time. The blue one. And bracelets like these
on my left arm. Isn't that true?" She held her left wrist, with the pair of bracelets, out toward
me. I nodded.
Creta Kano then said, "Of course, we did not have relations in reality. When you
ejaculated, it was not into me, physically, but in your own consciousness. Do you see? It was
a fabricated consciousness. Still, the two of us share the consciousness of having had relations
with each other."
"What's the point of doing something like that?"
"To know," she said. "To know more-and more deeply." I released a sigh. This was
crazy. But she had been describing the scene of my dream with incredible accuracy. Running
my finger around my mouth, I stared at the two bracelets on her left wrist.
"Maybe I'm not very smart," I said, my voice dry, "but I really can't claim to have
understood everything you've been telling me."
"In your second dream, when I was in the midst of having relations with you, another
woman took my place. Isn't that true? I have no idea who she was. But that event was
probably meant to suggest something to you, Mr. Okada. This is what I wanted to convey to
you." I said nothing in return.
"You should have no sense of guilt about having had relations with me," said Creta Kano.
"You see, Mr. Okada, I am a prostitute. I used to be a prostitute of the flesh, but now I am a
prostitute of the mind. Things pass through me."
At this point, Creta Kano left her seat and went down on her knees beside me, clutching
my hand in both of hers. She had soft, warm, very small hands. "Please hold me, Mr. Okada.
Right here and now."
We stood, and I put my arms around her. I honestly had no idea whether I should be doing
this. But holding Creta Kano just then, just there, did not seem to be a mistake. I could not
have explained it, but that was how I felt. I wrapped my arms around her slender body as if I
were taking my first lesson in ballroom dancing. She was a small woman. The top of her head
came just past the bottom of my chin. Her breasts pressed against my stomach. She held her


cheek against my chest. And although she made no sound the whole time, she was crying- I
could feel the warmth of her tears through my T-shirt. I looked down, to see her perfectly set
hair trembling. I felt I was having a well-made dream. But it was not a dream.
After we had stayed in that position without moving for a very long time, she pulled away
from me as if she had suddenly remembered something. Maintaining a distance, she looked at
me.
"Thank you so much, Mr. Okada," she said. "I will be going home now." She had
supposedly just been crying with some intensity, but her makeup had hardly been disturbed.
The sense of reality was now strangely absent.
"Are you going to be coming into my dreams again sometime?" I asked.
"I don't know," she said, with a gentle shake of the head. "Not even I can tell you that.
But please have faith in me. Whatever might happen, please don't be afraid of me or feel you
must be on your guard where I am concerned. Will you promise me that, Mr. Okada?" I
answered with a nod. Soon afterward, Creta Kano went home.
The darkness of night was thicker than ever. The front of my T-shirt was soaking wet. I
stayed up until dawn, unable to sleep. I didn't feel sleepy, for one thing, and in fact, I was
afraid to sleep- I had the feeling that if I were to go to sleep, I would be enveloped in a flow of
shifting sand that would carry me off to another world, from which I would never be able to
return. I stayed on the sofa until morning, drinking brandy and thinking about Creta Kano's
story. Even after the night had ended, the presence of Creta Kano and the fragrance of
Christian Dior eau de cologne lingered in the house like captive shadows.